Alexandra Scott released her January album "I Love You So
Much Always" after a battering string of personal losses. Between the end of 2012
and the beginning of 2014, the New Orleans singer-songwriter saw nine close
friends pass away. The title was taken from a conversation she had with one of
those muses, close to the end, and the recording was dedicated to their
collective memory.

Its final release
felt like a triumph, the end of a long, tough road toward art processing and
finally, conquering, grief.

So to anyone who knew its narrative, it seemed like the most
tasteless kind of cosmic joke that, in the short time between the album's
initial release and the party scheduled to celebrate it on Thursday (Jan. 23) at the All Ways Lounge,
Scott was blindsided by the deaths of two more friends: one peacefully, at an
advanced age, and one violently and by his own hand.

If it were any other album, Scott wrote in a post on the
album's event page Thursday, she would have cancelled the show. Instead, she
said, the party would be a memorial — as the album was, but just a little more timely.

"We're the least traditional of New Orleans bands," she said
from the stage Thursday. "But this is a jazz funeral of sorts. That's why I
live here — because you can laugh, and cry and dance all out in the open, and
people don't judge you for it."

For the most part, "I Love You So Much Always" is
pop-inflected folk guitar and piano, with hushed harmonies and fiddle from Sam
Craft and Alexis Marceaux (the couple performed as part of Scott's Magical Band
Thursday, as well) that weave a meditative tone. As a writer, Scott has an
intuitive poetic gift for expressing how things can be tragic, absurd and achingly
beautiful all at once. Her songs are often deceptively simple, with a powerful
sensory payoff. Litanies of abstracted words and phrases string together, like
tiny flags on a line; they sneak up to deliver an unexpected emotional kick and
a peek into her strange, lovely, big-hearted mind. The joyous, prayerful "Coney Island Baby" is an enchanting example of this. So is "If You Don't Love
Elvis," a quirky and surprisingly affecting love note to rock n'roll.

Scott's off-kilter sense of humor pervaded Thursday's show,
from her opening solo banjo performance of Paula Abdul's "Straight Up" to
pitch-perfect, straight-faced harmonizing, at one a.m., with Marceaux and
members of Kelcy Mae's band on Lorde's multiple-Grammy-nominated 2013 hit
"Royals."

In her own writing and in her cover choices, Scott is
skilled at being funny without making fun, reverent without being overly pious
and, particularly in the context of the new album, letting sadness do its thing
without allowing it to tip into misery. These are subtle talents – in their balance,
kind of Zen – and they're probably what makes "I Love You So Much Always" such
a sneakily engaging album.

They also engage a strong community. When the singer, in the
wee hours of Friday morning, called for any musicians in the house to join her
onstage, the bar emptied out. Along with Craft, Marceaux, bassist Rick Nelson and Kelcy Mae, the
singer-songwriter Dayna Kurtz, Rotary Downs' Jason Rhein, members of the New
Orleans Swamp Donkeys, Natalie Mae Palms and others crowded onto the stage to
trade verses on the traditional funeral sendoff "I'll Fly Away," in honor of Scott's
lost friends. She passed out bottles of bubble liquid, and soapy
little spheres soon started to glitter in the air. And if the club's door banged open more than once after
midnight, with nobody behind it, who's to say if it was the weather, or
friendly ghosts?